Guided tours are often used to offer a visitor a complete view on an exposition, city, country, company, park, etc. The tour ensures that a visitor is sent to all the important points of interest and that the visitor receives an explanation at each point. The explanation can be a wide range of information. For instance, history of a place, how a machine works, how a city evolved, etc. In general, it tells visitors everything they may want to know or should know about the point of interest which they are currently visiting. An obvious way of providing visitors with a guided tour, is with human guides who move around with the visitors and give an oral explanation during the tour. This way, the visitors get an experience wherein personal experiences of the guide can be added to the general information that is provided by each guide. However, personal experiences from various guides are not always shared with all the visitors.
Alternatively to human guides, terminals which can be carried by a visitor can be used to give a guided tour. These terminals can for instance contain a screen whereon visual information is shown, or the terminals can also contain speakers or a headphone plug for audio based information. The terminal may also be designed to offer a combination of audio and video to the user during the tour. Such terminals can show a predefined route to the user, for instance a chronological order of the paintings and statues in a museum or a chronological order of when particular buildings were constructed, or any other ordering of the points of interest in a particular way. Such terminal can contain a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver which can be used to trigger information related to the current location of the visitor. This enables a visitor to walk to various points of interest in the order he wants and receive related information when the visitor arrives at a given point. One example of a guided tour with a terminal carried by a user is offered by the tourist service of the province of Limburg in Belgium. They provide a terminal to cyclists which offers information on various routes in the province related to a particular subject.
However, several problems exist with these existing methods and tools for guiding visitors. A problem of the first prior art solution is that human guides are generally only available for groups that want to take a tour. This means that everyone in the group has to follow the guide which implies that there is no free choice of the route. Thus, a visitor cannot skip a particular point of interest along the route or take an alternative route to visit all the points of interest.
A problem with the second prior art solution is that the existing terminals are limited in the information they can provide. They are set-up with particular pieces of information such as audio and video fragments or texts which relate to the points of interest. Once the information is on the terminal, it cannot change during the visit without a reconfiguration of the device. This means that the information cannot be adapted to temporary exhibitions or special events that may occur from time to time. These terminals do enable the general public to change their route, for instance if the terminals are GPS based or offer a selection of all the available points of interest to the visitor. However, in doing so, the experience of participating in a group is greatly reduced if not inexistent. If everyone visits the points of interest in the order they choose, there is less or no contact amongst the visitors. It is impossible to exchange information between visitors unless they stick together during the tour.
An additional drawback of such devices is that they are only able to deliver rather static information to a user and to determine the location of the user. However, context information such as the time of day, weather conditions, the number of visitors at an event or exhibition, etc. are not taken into account. As a result, the visitor can end up in a very crowded place while other parts of a tour are empty, or a visitor can be sent into the rain while a part of the indoor exhibition could be visited first.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system for of experiencing a tour or nomadic event in an interactive way, i.e. in a way wherein information is provided to the users without losing the group experience and without requiring every user of the group to simultaneously follow the exact same route. It is a further object of the invention to deliver context specific information to users sharing a nomadic experience.